Traffic: It's unclear when BuzzFeed hit 10 million users but it was sometime in the past 2 years. In May 2010 when it raised $8 million (and Dixon invested) it had 3 million monthly uniques in the US. Today it has about 30 million monthly uniques, up from 20 million in April.

Raise Series A years before hitting 10 million milestone

From the above, it looks like Dixon's 10 million user number is most feasible for mobile app companies. Draw Something reached 50 million users at warp speed. Instagram's growth was slower but it still grew at an explosive rate that any investor would be happy to financially back.

For other startups, particularly media companies, the 10 million figure is almost impossible to hit pre-Series A. Pinterest has experienced the most explosive growth but even then its success was four years in the making. The company raised outside capital long before it hit the 10 million user mark -- it just exploded from almost no traffic to about 10 million users very quickly, in about 8 months.

But for news-driven sites like BuzzFeed and Bleacher Report, there's no way to achieve Dixon's magic number without Series A financing first.

That said, the overall message behind Dixon's post rings true:

Times have changed.

Investors are falling out of love with consumer startups. They see too many of them and not enough of them live up to the hype. Consumers are getting tired of hearing about new ones too. Their time is limited and so are their attention spans.

Dixon is also right that companies are able to scale faster now than ever, so if you can't get those staggering numbers with little initial capital, it could be the end of the road for your startup.

I sincerely doubt that early Pinterest, Tumblr, Foursquare, Path, Instagram, BuzzFeed, or Bleacher Report could secure an "A" round of funding in June 2013.

Early Pinterest did struggle almost 3 years to find funding, which corroborates that.

Early Facebook and Twitter probably could haved raise funding in June 2013. Maybe. Not sure.

But yeah, I do see a LOT of startups in Silicon Valley struggling to raise financing right now.

I'd argue that, functioning in a healthy fashion, the pendulum should never swing far enough that early Pinterest, Tumblr, Foursquare etc couldn't find financing. I also think the dogmatic adherence to metrics as a decision-making lens is also an unhealthy development.